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chuckroIvan Attila picks the wrong day to test out his new full-immersion suit for the hot MMO that he makes his living writing cheats for, because that’s the day everyone gets locked into the system and an insane AI makes a bid for world conquest.
I wanted something relatively mindless that I didn’t really have to engage in while I was recovering from oral surgery. This fit that bill nicely. Here are some highlights of the fridge logic that hit me once the painkillers wore off:
The writing is okay, though there are occasional points where it’s clear they didn’t just choose Russia as the setting because they like it. They also seem to love the phrase, “It’s a good job that…”, which makes me wonder if they learned British English rather than American.
If you make your main character a hacker who writes cheat devices for a game, perhaps his role in the plot should involve some amount of hacking or writing cheat devices, rather than just fiddling with the one thing he made and otherwise being an action movie hero.
The authors don’t really connect all of the pieces of their plot well, which makes me wonder if they each wrote different sections. At the same time that the evil corporation is being protested because their players can’t log out and are falling into comas, they have a parade of bigwigs coming into their office to try on the new brainwashing helmets, and the CEO and CTO are unavailable because they’re logged into the system. Maybe they do things differently in Russia, but I feel like if Blizzard was dealing with the massive PR disaster that was underage players falling into comas, no one would be showing up to test out their new technology and the DoJ (and an army of civil lawyers) would be very interested in hearing why the CEO wasn’t available.
It’s extremely obvious that this book was written by two guys, given thatSmurfette Yanna is incredibly competent in the game, and then finds herself sailing through every obstacle in the real world via sex appeal. (Apparently studying medicine levels up Bluff and Stealth, and also allows you to do really idiotic things to a dying person and have them work perfectly.) Oh, and she gets with Attila at the end for no real reason besides them happening to be in the same place at that point.
The ending is far, far too “Saturday morning cartoon pilot movie”, though I’ll admit I read the last tenth of the book without any oxycodone in my system, which might have biased me against it. “Let’s form a super-team and fight cyber-crime! And also Alpha, who’ll be back with more schemes!” Also, Attila manages to completely forget that he owes money to loan sharks and that’s why he was trying to sell the Eye in the first place. Granted, this is resolved by the big cash influx from Wayfarer, but even so, it really did deserve a mention.
Overall: I’d call this the gamer/action/sci-fi equivalent of a Harlequin paperback that you read on the beach and then promptly forget about. It’s no work of great literature (and in fact has some pretty impressive plot holes and scientific inaccuracies), but it’s a fast read that’s moderately fun.
I wanted something relatively mindless that I didn’t really have to engage in while I was recovering from oral surgery. This fit that bill nicely. Here are some highlights of the fridge logic that hit me once the painkillers wore off:
The writing is okay, though there are occasional points where it’s clear they didn’t just choose Russia as the setting because they like it. They also seem to love the phrase, “It’s a good job that…”, which makes me wonder if they learned British English rather than American.
If you make your main character a hacker who writes cheat devices for a game, perhaps his role in the plot should involve some amount of hacking or writing cheat devices, rather than just fiddling with the one thing he made and otherwise being an action movie hero.
The authors don’t really connect all of the pieces of their plot well, which makes me wonder if they each wrote different sections. At the same time that the evil corporation is being protested because their players can’t log out and are falling into comas, they have a parade of bigwigs coming into their office to try on the new brainwashing helmets, and the CEO and CTO are unavailable because they’re logged into the system. Maybe they do things differently in Russia, but I feel like if Blizzard was dealing with the massive PR disaster that was underage players falling into comas, no one would be showing up to test out their new technology and the DoJ (and an army of civil lawyers) would be very interested in hearing why the CEO wasn’t available.
It’s extremely obvious that this book was written by two guys, given that
The ending is far, far too “Saturday morning cartoon pilot movie”, though I’ll admit I read the last tenth of the book without any oxycodone in my system, which might have biased me against it. “Let’s form a super-team and fight cyber-crime! And also Alpha, who’ll be back with more schemes!” Also, Attila manages to completely forget that he owes money to loan sharks and that’s why he was trying to sell the Eye in the first place. Granted, this is resolved by the big cash influx from Wayfarer, but even so, it really did deserve a mention.
Overall: I’d call this the gamer/action/sci-fi equivalent of a Harlequin paperback that you read on the beach and then promptly forget about. It’s no work of great literature (and in fact has some pretty impressive plot holes and scientific inaccuracies), but it’s a fast read that’s moderately fun.
